The Idaho Dairymen's Association recently launched a new effort to promote immigration reform, the Times-News reported Feb. 21. "Immigration reform is important to the economy of Idaho and the United States," an association official told the newspaper. "Our goal is to protect the borders but also to promote responsible immigration reform."

This effort by the dairymen is one more example of how states, communities and industries throughout the Rocky Mountain West are forced by economic necessity to assert leadership in the nation's dysfunctional immigration system.

The failure of the federal government to create a realistic pathway to permanent residence - or even to develop a functional guest worker system - has left many Western businesses struggling to adequately staff their operations. The dairymen's association in December hired a prominent immigration lawyer and formed a business coalition to "push for stable immigration policy on a national level." It was just a month earlier that Border Patrol agents arrested more than 100 illegal immigrants in the Twin Falls area. Many businesses, especially those in agriculture and the booming construction sector, rely heavily on immigrant labor. Among those laborers are 20,000 to 35,000 undocumented workers in Idaho, according to estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center.

Illegal immigration is a serious problem. But it's just one symptom of the real malady - an immigration policy that doesn't serve our nation's needs and threatens to undermine prosperity in the West.

Idaho's dairymen are not alone in their desire for reform. For example, ranchers in Colorado who depend on seasonal guest workers are shorthanded because permits for would-be employees are frequently delayed, denied or unavailable due to unrealistically small annual quotas. In order to combat the labor scarcity, Colorado lawmakers have proposed the creation of an office in Mexico to recruit guest workers, a policy that would challenge the federal leadership our immigration law anticipates.

Arizona is also coping with a severe labor shortage and is considering its own temporary worker program. These efforts are examples of states forced to patch problems that the federal government fails to resolve.

Job growth throughout most of the Rockies has for years exceeded the ability to fill them with American-born workers. Our region's economic prosperity rides on the availability of workers. Federal law, however, makes lawful immigration virtually impossible for many of the workers we need.

The United States allows a mere 10,000 people with "essential skills" to obtain work visas yearly - a tiny fraction needed to fill the jobs waiting for people with those skills. Legitimate businesses run great risks as they attempt to operate on the receiving end of failed immigration policy.

Existing immigration law also makes no provision for most of the undocumented workers in our region to obtain work visas. They're here illegally because there's no legal way for them to take the opportunities our economy offers.

As willing workers are increasingly denied access to vacant U.S. jobs, significant losses for businesses are mounting throughout the Rocky Mountain region. The current system forces industries and states to pursue stop-gap remedies. But the solution isn't to add special exemptions for particular industries like agriculture - we've already done too much of that and the results have contributed to the present quagmire. The solution is to comprehensively fix our broken system of immigration so that the best way to immigrate to America is to do so legally and so employers can count on legal immigrants to fill jobs for which there are no native-born workers.

Birch Faber and Brad Hash are research assistants for Western Progress, a Missoula, Mont., nonpartisan policy institute focused on the Rocky Mountain West.